Customer Reviews

Monster of London City/Secret of the Red Orchid

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I'm a horror nut. I love strange old movies as well. I was really looking forward to this disc only to be severely disappointed. The first movie is a slightly atmospheric but ultimatly mundane Jack The Ripper story. The second film, "Secret of the Red Orchid" is the film that features Mr. Lee and Mr. Kinski. It is absolutely atrocious. It's horribly dubbed; Christopher Lee is dubbed. It's a low budget gangster film that isn't worth more than 99 cents.

As I like old classic movies, I also like to indulge in some old, campy, horror movies from the 60's and 70's as well--"The Monster of London City" is one of them. A German film of the "krimi" genre and written by Edgar Wallace, and similar to the far superior "The Phantom of Soho," this effort about a series of Jack the Ripper-like murders in fashionable London, circa 1960 is an agreeable time-filler if nothing more. In this film we think the murderer is obvious, but there are enough red herrings to keep our attention for approximately 90 minutes. For the most part, the transfer is quite clean and audio is remarkably clear, not usually the case with many of these rare, hard-to-find films.

The second film's starring attraction, Christopher Lee in "Secret of the Red Orchid" is an unintentionally funny horror film with him dubbed in an horribly poor American accent. One would think any film with Christopher Lee would be at least watchable, but not in this case.

The film also features Klaus Kinski (who has made some appearances in some great films and some truly bad ones) as a notorious London underworld figure. With a rather dull plot and chracters as interesting and substantive as this year's Presidental debates, This film really does not hold one's interest for very long and the viewer will often find himself (as I did) easily distracted and trying to think of something far more constructive to do with his time.

I have noted that a numbers of reviewers dislike the lack of quality and poor dubbing of some of the Edgar Wallace thrillers available in the US.
Amazon Germany have a large numbers of the same films available on their website.
NOT all are dubbed or sub-titled in English but four of their box-sets are. Just go to the page and look at the details in the middle. It will say whether they are sub-titled or dubbed. Box-sets ONE, THREE and FIVE, plus one I forget. I find watching them in the original German takes me back to my tiny local Kino in Moedling near Vienna back in the Sixties.What old world fun we had, being shocked and screaming when the killers were lurking etc, and that was the men in the audience!
So you can get at least 12 EW's films with sub-tiles and/or dubbing from Amazon.de. The set up of pages is the same and your details are already in their system, so there's no having to start a new account all over again.
But,please,don't watch them one after the other, enjoy them at 1-2 month intervals and by the time you have seen 12, you can go back to the first one again.